View full sizeMarvin Fong, The Plain DealerA view of the cutter head of the tunnel boring machine called "Mackenzie" , which is being used to cut a shaft for the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District's Euclid Creek Tunnel project, on Friday, June 1, 2012. The construction site is located off E. 140th street in Bratenahl, OH.

UPDATED at 3 p.m.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The giant drilling machine "Mackenzie" disappeared from sight today to begin boring a sewer tunnel under parts of the city and out under Lake Erie.

The cutting head of the giant drill being rented by the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District was lowered 200 feet down by a crane into what is known as Shaft 1 of the district’s Euclid Creek Tunnel. Eventually, it will become a 3-mile span that will belly out under the lake at one point.

Large mechanical buckets will scoop up the debris and dump it onto a conveyor belt, which will carry the rock bits out of the tunnel to be hauled away.

The machine, which will move forward in five-foot increments for the entire 18,000-foot length of the tunnel, will then put pre-formed concrete sections of the tunnel in place before it moves forward to cut again.

According to the sewer district news release:

The Euclid Creek Tunnel is the first in a series of storage tunnels being constructed as a part of Project Clean Lake, the Sewer District’s 25-year, $3 billion program to drastically reduce the amount of combined sewage entering local waterways annually.

The tunnel will start in Bratenahl, south of Interstate 90, and continue northeast to the District’s Easterly Wastewater Treatment Plant.

It will continue under Lake Erie for about 3000 feet and pass under the shoreline near Green Creek at East 152nd Street. The tunnel will then head east, following Lake Shore Boulevard and Nottingham Road, and end at St. Clair Avenue.

The Euclid Creek Tunnel will be located 190 to 220 feet below ground. The tunnel will be 18,000 feet long, with a diameter of 24 feet. It will have the capacity to hold 52 million gallons of combined stormwater and wastewater. The estimated cost of construction for the Euclid Creek Tunnel is $198 million.

Other than the existing Morton Salt mines (far deeper at 2,000 feet below ground) and the city of Cleveland's water intake pipes (from 10 to 50 feet below the lake bed), the Euclid Creek tunnel will be the first construction project on record under the lake, a spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said in a previous report on the project..

The project is the first visible evidence in a larger and the much-debated issue --the $3 billion planby the sewer district to meet requirements of the federal Clean Water Act over the next 25 years.

That planned work has been applauded by environmentalists, but bemoaned by already tax-weary ratepayers in Cleveland and 60 suburbs who will likely see their bills reach $1,000 a year by 2035.

The problem: what sewer experts refer to as Combined Sewer Overflows or CSOs, the sudden rush of a mixture of storm water and raw sewage into streams, rivers and eventually Lake Erie during heavy rains.

The sewer district engineered the tunnel to go under the lake in part because the cost of acquiring lake-shore property or easements would likely be greater than the extra cost to lengthen the tunnel and burrow under the lake, officials said.

Instead, the district got the OK from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to tunnel under the lake.

"It turned out that the curve of the tunnel was actually more favorable to go under the lake, anyway," said Kellie Rotunno, sewer district engineer. "Liquids, sewage or anything else, don't like 90-degree turns."

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